Our Stories

Srun Bun Thuon, a fisherman from the Koh Kong province on the southwestern coast of Cambodia, saw his family’s life crumble seven years ago when he had to sell off his house to repay a microfinance debt.
“Even our daughter’s earrings were not spared. I took them off her ears to sell to pay off the d More

“This is the one everyone knows from cartoons – the little worm in the apple,” explains Eftim Petkovski, scooping the larva of a codling moth from an apple in his orchard in Resen. “But it’s no joke, I can tell you – if we farmers don’t spray for them early on, all our livelihoods are at risk. More

Farmer Tous Sok Heang carefully jots down the number on the scale each time a sack of rice is weighed, and a rice buyer does the same. When the last sack is lifted from the scale, the buyer hands her a down payment of US $200, promising to pay the rest later.
“We are rich today,” Tous Sok Heang joke More

Troimène Siméon grows nostalgic as she looks out at the barren mountains surrounding the town of Aquin, in southern Haiti. A mother of one, she dreams of seeing Haiti as green as it once was.
“Reforestation is life,” says Troimène, one of a group of women working for a reforestation project in her h More

Maribel Ubeda is among the 4,400 families from eight rural communities in Nicaragua who gained access to electricity when a new 300 kilowatt micro-hydropower plant was inaugurated by local authorities in her village.
“When they first told us about this project, people in my community didn’t believe More

The kindergarten in the village of Ermoclia has declared its independence — energy independence, that is. Instead of struggling to keep students warm with expensive imported gas, the kindergarten now heats up with locally produced biomass fuels.
It’s good for the children and the environment t More

“We used to do a lot of things without thinking about the effects on the environment,” says Naume Toskovski, an apple farmer in the Prespa Lakes region of Macedonia. “We didn’t know that dumping apples would pollute the water.”
The beautiful but environmentally vulnerable region of the Prespa Lake B More

Water is scarce in the occupied Palestinian territory and supplies barely meet the needs of the Palestinian people. More than 13 percent of the population currently has no access to running water, and many of the existing water facilities are dilapidated. Water quality is very poor: only 7 percent o More

Seventy-year-old Dang Jiuru dreamed of sending his grandson to university, but until recently his lifelong ambition seemed destined to remain unfulfilled. His apple orchard in Luochuan County, Shaanxi Province, simply did not make enough money. But just two years since he took the bold step of aband More

Eleven-year-old Mohamed Nasim, who is in sixth grade, wakes up at 5:30 every morning to take computer lessons in a makeshift classroom here in Borghaso village, Bamyan Province, northwest of Kabul. He draws a house in Microsoft paint, colors it, and types his name in the corner as his young teacher More